It's been awhile since we talked about the flaws of steelmanning ... a sub-category of the fallacy fallacy, I think. This post was fantastic. The OP's gymnastics blew me away.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DecodingTheGurus/comments/1vynnza/why_would_peter_thiel_be_interested_in_the/ I think it's wrong. But it's really good ... degenerate in a way ... an expression of schematic thought. How many ways can the free variables in a schematic sentence be filled in such that the sentence (and the language that houses it) can remain consistent? I was again piqued by "anacyclosis" and the stability of types of government. In a recent Zoom, a colleague DMed me asking when all this peri-Trump nonsense was going to end (especially the perversion of institutions like the NIH). My answer was to keep their shoulder to the wheel, that hard/steady work reliably wins the competition against bullshit. But I'm not hundy on that, of course, because I'm a dyed in the wool skeptic. Diversity facilitates resilience. And I'm either running out of ways to understand diversity. Or it's steadily decreasing in every domain I'm aware of, from music to bugs in the yard. Even *when* there's diversity in political opinions, most of my friends hide behind litmus tests of some kind or another. E.g. when discussing certain forbidden words, my woke friends insistently claimed they would NEVER use one of the words. I spent about 2 hours trying to repeat "Never say never" over and over again in a variety of different ways. They came away convinced i'm some kind of crypto-nazi or somesuch. That's fine. I'll take the reputational hit. But then, literally, about a week later, one of the friends in that argument confessed to having an affair. And our argument about never say never happened *right before* his SO found out about it. They recalled a time prior to the affair where they thought they were immune to such temptations. Now they realize how unstable they were before the affair. If you think you're incapable of evolving into some thing (e.g. pro-genocide or whatever), you should think again. The only thing that has any chance of preventing such is diversity of thought. Anyway, this paper might be interesting to some of us, here: Political science meets physical science: The shared concept of stability https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad401 Would be more interesting if the authors are not related. But I haven't looked 'em up. -- 8647 ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω. .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
